Paper short abstract:

This contribution reflects upon the lawsuit against the German Foreign Ministry for not returning Sudanese passports after the outbreak of war and thus capturing people in a warzone. It discusses the discrepancy between analyzing citizenship as practice and the superiority of citizenship as status.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly after the war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, the European states evacuated their citizens from Sudan. Various Western embassies were closed and evacuated – e.g., Germany, France, the UK, and the US – but kept the passports of Sudanese citizens who had before applied for visas and whose passports were stuck in the respective embassies. The passport holders were thus unable to cross the borders and caught in war. As an activist group, we campaigned against this procedure and pressed charges against the German Foreign Ministry.

This contribution reflects upon this lawsuit and the related process. After conducting one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on Sudan’s revolutionary movement resisting the military coup d’état in 2021, I analyzed the resistance as practices of citizenship. By enacting rights such as freedom of speech and assembly, I thought the revolutionaries enacted citizenship against the military occupation that denied them these rights.

The events after the war outbreak shed new light on citizenship. Experiencing the already known superiority of neo-colonial power structures and the resulting global citizenship inequality made me question the analytical approach for my ethnography. How can we analyze the subversive power of citizenship as practice when it is citizenship as status that rules over the “naked life”? What is the Arendtian “right to have rights”, if even this most fundamental right is denied? And, most importantly, what can “engaged anthropology” do to challenge the global order of citizenship?